This paper examines the report of the Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy
(Department of Education, Science & Training (DEST), 2005) and explores the
claims it makes about reading pedagogy and the centrality of particular
'methods' or 'approaches' to teaching backed by 'scientific' evidence. Discourse
analysis of the report shows that its logics allow only certain kinds of
evidence to count in policy, and that it reduces difficult social and political
issues to questions of technique. This allows the report to recommend an
approach whereby qualitative insights and practitioners’ experience can be
bypassed through valorising methods developed and verified by scientific
researchers. The report’s claims are considered genealogically in the light of
historical cases from the early nineteenth century, where educational reformers
struggled with the issue of how to educate the children of the poor. In one, the
monitorial system promoted by Lancaster in England, there was a focus on reading
which made teachers or monitors artefacts of a standardised method. By way of
contrast, in Scotland, a classroom approach developed by Stow (1854) made the
teacher central to the process, as someone who sensitively interpreted and
extended students’ experiences with texts. Stow’s approach would form the model
for the modern classroom in compulsory state schooling, while the monitorial
system would eventually be abandoned as ineffective. The historical cases
demonstrate the dangers of approaches to policy that fail to account for the
complex interplay between teacher, student and text in the reading lesson.

Reading primers and reading instruction: Historical perspectives

From the late sixteenth century, in response to the problem of how best to teach
children to read, a variety of texts such as primers, spellers and readers were
produced in England for vernacular instruction. This paper describes how these
materials were used by teachers to develop first, a specific religious
understanding according to the stricture of the time and second, a moral reading
practice that aimed not only to provide instruction in how to read but also in
how to conduct oneself provided the child with a guide to secular conduct. The
analysis focuses on the use of these texts as a productive means for shaping the
child-reader in the context of newly emerging educational spaces which fostered
a particular, morally formative relation among teacher, child and text.

Re-Reading the Reading Lesson: Episodes in the History of Reading Pedagogy

Debates on the teaching of reading, marked in such policy documents as the Rowe
Report (2005) in Australia and the Rose Report (2006) in the UK, have a long
history and indeed are at least coterminous with schooling itself. However, that
history rarely figures in any significant or rigorous way in either the policy
or the debate, which are characteristically professional and technical in their
orientation, and/or organised around claims and counter-claims regarding the
‘sciences’ of both reading and pedagogy. More needs to be done in the historical
investigation of reading pedagogy if a properly informed historical imagination
is to be taken seriously in the social field of educational policy and practice.

Drawing on a range of historical sources, the paper looks specifically at what
appears in the historical record as a distinctive formulation, or trope: the
reading lesson. In our research, this is examined across various accounts, in
terms of description, commentary, and materials, to reveal a set of striking
features regarding the politico-ethical character of not just reading pedagogy
but also, we argue, literacy education more generally. The concept of the
‘reading lesson’ as it has been mobilised historically is introduced here, and
traced through a range of key documents with a particular bearing on Australian
educational history although the field of reference is much broader than that,
with a view to outlining how that trope stands in for reading pedagogy as a
distinctive social program.

Reference details:
Cormack, P. (in press, accepted 16/03/2012) Children’s school reading and curriculum innovation
at the edge of Empire: The School Paper in late nineteenth-century Australia. History of Education Review.